Sequence... Time passes me by
Nothing to get into a flap about!
From "Time of Day" to "Time of Year" to "Time for Tea" to... "Time passes me by..." I have time on my hands and yet no time to do everything I want. I sometimes think I have no time to do anything... at other times I think I have nothing to do... which is when I know I'm in that state of "Stuckness" I described in my first webblog. (Warning note: Nude self-portrait image on that page!)
Time passes us all by but how many of us think about it... or care. I make my wife's hot chocolate drink every morning and watch the milk for two minutes to catch it as it rises but before it froths and surges over the side of the pan. I stand watching waiting for it to happen for two whole minutes and think sometimes obsessively that I can never have those minutes back again... but if I attend to something else and let the milk spill over the rim of the pan onto the hot stove it will take me five minutes to scrape and clean off the mess. More time lost.
I sometimes spend an hour avidly looking through the categories I've bookmarked on eBay in case I miss a wonderful bargain... whereas in reality I know whatever it is I cannot really afford anyway. For me a fast and hard way to switch off browsing is to come across an item which has reached double or treble the price I got for an identical one last week. If only I had waited a little longer before listing mine... but there wasn't time.
I sometimes spend an hour in the local bar drinking coffee when I should be doing the things I couldn't attend to in those accumulated minutes of time at home I was doing something else... or nothing. I could have brought the day's firewood into the house... or done the laundry ironing... or cleaned the kitchen floor. But if I didn't have a regular coffee break with whoever happened to be there would I lose my daily updated understanding of the beautiful French language? Time will tell.
The timed sequence above was of my Gensign desk clock... after 40 years the minute and hour flaps still click over... every minute... every hour... on time... the synchronous motor gently whirring away... the flaps distractingly noisier the quieter and more peaceful the house I move on to every few years or so becomes.
I photographed it with a 55mm Micro-Nikkor on a Nikon F2... no problems at all... until the 36th frame... the final shot of the 36-minute sequence leading up to the midnight hour... all careful planned and what happened? The film wound on only 25mm of its supposed 37.5mm (35mm plus the rebate between the frames) before stopping tight with none left in the cassette... but the amount of travel on the camera's lever wind was just enough to re-cock the shutter so the camera fired the final time although the film wasn't fully wound on.
The effect was not displeasing... on the contact sheet, which has become the final print, the midnight hour looks as though it has arrived a few seconds early... ahead of time. And again it reminds me that time is passing me by.
8:35:18 PM 
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